


Allegory of Spring

by objectlesson



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon, Dolce coda, Established Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Season 3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 18:59:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4316058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Strange, how a man can live with a single kidney, but not without a heart."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allegory of Spring

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little meditation on heartbreak. Takes place in season three, spoilers ahead!

The first thing Will does upon waking is reach for the last place he felt Hannibal inside him. He wants to push wrist deep into the wound, he wants to find a hand hidden within his flesh he can grip. He wants to touch where he has been touched. Instead his fingers scrape clumsily against the sterile white of a bandage. He’s wrapped around the torso, neat dressings which conceal the jagged grimace carved into his flesh, the pucker of inflamed skin stapled together to keep him from spilling out of himself and onto Hannibal’s kitchen floor. 

He doesn’t feel like he has been kept from spilling out. He feels empty, eviscerated, like all the slippery sacs of blood and shit and organ meat which make his body function have been scooped out with a melon baller, leaving nothing but his rind. He feels like Hannibal took it all. Ran off with everything which makes him a person. He feels dead. 

His vision comes back to him slowly as he blinks the haze away. He’s in a hospital room, though he imagined the frosted chrome doors of Hannibal’s refrigerator and freezer beside him, he imagined sinking deeper into the combined pool of his and Abigail’s blood. There’s an IV bag, white sheets, the cruel florescence of hospital lights burning into him and making him squint. A voice like an echo which he ignores in favor of rubbing his fingers over the mark Hannibal left in him, thinking distantly about all that has been taken, and all which he has lost. 

\---

Hannibal hates the smell of the airport. It’s a deluge of human baseness, a cacophony of perfumes and lotions and deodorants and shampoos all working in vain to mask the sour stew of sweat and spit and dirty diaper, the banal existence of the dreadful human animal. Here there is nothing but vile smells. The fear of flying, the elderly, children, cheap vodka stashed in cheap luggage. Every kind of person packed together in this test tube, where just beyond there is the burn of diesel, the promise of clouds. Hannibal might as well be touring a slaughterhouse. 

He shuffles unseen through security, much like a ghost, a shadow. As he does so he keeps a silk kerchief pressed to his nose to prevent the overwhelm from sullying him, but it’s too laundered to mask anything. He can smell the mundane sadness of humanity through it, insidious fingers of ennui snaking their way through the fiber and up inside him. 

He finds it all so very dull. All of the petty lives, the pretty travels. Even Bedelia, who surprises him on occasion which is a feat few people have achieved, stirs nothing but a mild disgust in his chest as he watches her now. The careful blonde coif of her hair as she tilts her head to look at her passport, the pale slip of her neck where she dabs her gardenia perfume, a place to which he sometimes presses a kiss so that he can admire her expensive taste, though nothing else. 

He imagines a ship on a bottle, and beyond his control, there is a measured clench of his heart in response to this image. Hannibal stills for a moment, lets himself feel the strange horror of sensation throbbing inside him with his pulse.  
\---

Will learns to walk again, ashamed of his helplessness, ashamed that his physical therapist is at least attempting to treat him as if he were a living person. He does not feel like he is living as he struggles to right his spine, the shuddering weakness in his severed abdominals making him curl like the last leaf of winter clinging the branch. 

_You look like an old man_ , Abigail tells him, mouth flickering with a smile though she tries to keep it down, tries to stifle it so she doesn’t rob him of his dignity. Will has no dignity to be robbed of, as he spends most of his energy conversing with a dead girl and aching for the man who killed her. It’s an undignified fate. He tries to stand, he tries to walk, he tries to remind himself that Abigail is dead and Hannibal is gone, but still, he turns to her and says _I’m not an old man, just a dead one._

_You’re not dead_ , she chides, fingers rising to idly ghost over her own bandage, the one that matches his. _Not yet._

They lie in silence after his physical therapy session ends, tucked into his narrow bed, his breath staggering out of him with the exertion of trying to exist when he has lost everything. He presses his lips into Abigail’s imaginary hair, inhales her imaginary scent, and asks her _do you miss him? Even after what he did to you?_

She says nothing, just nods in the affirmative against Will’s arm. Her eyes prickle with tears; he can feel the dampness through his flimsy hospital gown. _I do too_ , he admits. 

Then she tilts her face up to him, pale save for the pink rim of her eyes, swollen from her grief, which is, of course, his grief, too. Her mouth wavers around something unsaid, and she swallows before asking in a hush _were you in love with him?_

Will looks away abruptly, so abruptly she disappears, leaving him alone in this cold room with its white walls and harsh lighting like the FBI morgue, like a crime scene. Since she is gone, he doesn’t answer. He just closes his eyes, surprised to feel the inevitable beat of his heart still thud thudding along. 

\---

Hannibal finds himself wishing so very often he had taken something more from Will upon his departure, more than his blood, more than his sorrow. Sometimes he wishes it was his kidney, other times he wishes it was his heart, before he remembers that one can live without a single kidney, but will perish when robbed of his heart. 

Usually, he wishes he had just taken a scrap of his clothing. A panel of cotton torn from his shirt, stained in copper-slick before hardening to blackness, smelling of rot and cheap aftershave and fear sweat and the incredible, fleeting miracle of not being alone. When the world smells too blanched with boredom and vapidity, Hannibal wishes he could procure this scrap of Will’s shirt and press it to his nose and mouth, inhale with his eyes closed and his face raised towards God. He wishes he could suck the corner of it into his mouth, taste the lovely metallic bite of Will’s blood, the memory of him sharp and real if only for a moment. 

He closes his eyes, and raises his face towards God. Bedelia sees him from where she is lying half-nude on the bed, hand curled elegantly around the gold-plated banister of the headboard, eyes fixed upon him as he beseeches. “You’re thinking of Will Graham,” she says smoothly. He can imagine her, sweat beading between her breasts, eyes wide and rabbit-frightened and always a half-second away from fluttering shut in wonder at the brambles she has fallen into. He smiles, and opens his eyes. 

“Yes,” he admits. “Strange, how a man can live with a single kidney, but not without a heart. However, such organs are nearly interchangeable in a recipe. The same texture, the same muscle consistency.” 

She blinks, draws her fingers down the line of her own throat to toy with the fine gold chain there. “Is Will Graham your heart?” 

Hannibal cocks his head, wondering. “Perhaps. We will see if I survive without him.”

She nods, eyes flickering closed. “We will see.” 

\---

When he escapes to the melodic trickle of the stream in his head, Will’s hand rises reflexively to one of two places. Sometimes it flattens over the place where his heart supposedly resides, the place in him which aches each time he thinks of Hannibal and misses him with such futile longing. Other times it creeps under the hem of his shirt, to the still-tender scar across his stomach. The eternal grin-grimace of a skull reminding him that in the end, death always wins. God always wins. Hannibal Lecter always wins. 

Will touches these two places like he’s looking for someone, seeking the creator of his heart, the carver of his scars. And of course, that is what he’s doing. When he fishes with Abigail in his mind, standing calf-deep in the chill of the stream and casting his line over and over again, he knows what he wishes to pull to him, the catch he imagines, whose lip he wants his hook to impale. He knows that the reason he feels incomplete and barely alive is because without Hannibal Lecter, there is no art to Will’s existence, to his cruelty, his urges. After all he has done, Will still _needs_ him. He is bound. 

It does not take long for Will to deduce where Hannibal has likely run to, the shadows in which he is concealing himself. He imagines going there too often, refreshing his browser as he idly scans plane tickets, imagining what he will do when he finds his maker. He imagines throwing him up against the wall by his throat, licking the blood from his upper lip because in every room of his memory-palace, Hannibal looks just as Will left him. Tear-stricken and streaked in his own blood, heartbroken and betrayed and prepared to slice the throat of every one Will has ever loved. He imagines him as such, and still, he fantasizes about finding him and falling into him, filling the void in his chest, reopening the scar in his flesh, knocking him down to his back upon the skeleton hewn into the floor, reminding them both that in the end, death always wins. 

\---

Some days, Hannibal feels like he can rise from this loss unscathed. He feels his usual self, as cold and efficient as any predator, building his new world without the blood of Will Graham to paint its walls. It’s a relief. He thinks that Will was merely his kidney, not his heart, another disposable organ to which he can cook into a meal and take back into himself, completing the circuit until he is whole once again. On these days, he is pleased with what has come to pass, pleased with Bedelia, Pleased with Europe. He can adapt, and this is the new story he will adapt to. 

But then, something will remind him, and he will feel the irritating pain of it surge into him once again, get its teeth in his flesh and pull until he is ruptured, strewn, broken. He realizes, again and again, that despite his moments unclouded by love, he is still quite compromised. Will surfaces in him like a corpse left to rot in a lake, so bloated with gas it eventually comes up bobbing and fetid and impossible to ignore. Hannibal can shove him down, but eventually, he returns, the memory ever uglier, ever more decayed. 

He can try to convince himself he does not feel, but the reality is that he _does_. It is the nature of sharing oneself truly with another: you cease being the sole victor of your mind, and cede control to the soul you bled into. 

Hannibal does not regret bleeding into Will Graham. He only regrets letting him go, leaving him on the kitchen floor in favor of the rain. He regrets not forcing Will to run with him. He regrets not spending the last few minutes prior to being caught flaying Will open and emptying him, frying up his liver in salt and butter while he sipped his final glass of wine. Either would have saved him the pain of being without him, now. Either would have done. 

\---

Will decides to rebuild a boat. It gives him something to do with his hands and also time to think, to talk himself out of it, to reconsider the inescapable madness of traveling across the country in desperate search of a man who nearly killed him. He waits for the soothing practicality of the task to shed sudden light on the impracticality of the situation, but he reaches no other conclusion, suffers no freeing revelation.He knows he has to find Hannibal. Knows he has to see him again. The only fluctuation in Will’s reasoning is whether he think’s he’s sailing to Europe to kill Hannibal, or return to the unparalleled comfort of his arms. Of being known. 

He also knows he is sick. He can list a number of conditions and neuroses which would warrant the grand depth of his feeling, his compulsion to return, his ability to forgive the man who singlehandedly stripped him of every last semblance of his own humanity. The man who got inside his head, who framed him for murder, who killed his surrogate daughter, who stole his morality and molded it into bloodlust. He knows he’s sick, but regardless, he cannot help but feeling like this is the truth. This is his real self, his honest core, his _soul_. 

His soul obscured by Hannibal’s distance, like seeing one’s reflection through a mirror clouded in soot, in a patina of dried blood. He wants to scrape it off, he wants to see himself again. He wants to take Hannibal’s hand in his and drag it down the length of his sternum, he wants to guide those steady fingers to his heart-void, to the puckered twist of his eternal smile and say _see? See?_ He wants him back, so that he can have _himself_ back. 

And maybe this, too, is Hannibal’s doing. Will considers it, tinkering with the crushed metal of an antique propellor shell he is hammering back into its rightful shape. He weighs the very real possibility that Hannibal did not turn him inside out to show him his interior, but only made him think that he was showing him the slick of his insides, when in reality he was only showing him _his_. But as Will constructs his own escape across the Atlantic, his odyssey home, he realizes he doesn’t _care_ who Hannibal showed him. He doesn’t care, because they are the same thing. 

\---

When Hannibal grows weary of waiting and the ache grows too vast, he kills a man fashions his corpse into an origami heart. It’s a labor intensive process and his arms throb with the effort of it for days to come, but he thinks it is an elegant admission, an artful clue. An arrow pointing towards the flesh it was flayed from. He knows Will can recognize it, for he surely must be enduring the same agony, the same loss. For if Will is Hannibal’s heart, then Hannibal must be his in return. A man cannot live without a heart, and there are two to share between them. It is simple arithmetic.

Hannibal thinks of Will’s throat in his own fist, he thinks of pressing his thumb into the flutter of his pulse to feel all that keeps him alive thrum under him like a brook. He thinks of kissing him so deep Will chokes to death on his tongue, he thinks of crushing the lifeless body to his own and swaying under its terrible weight, dropping to his knees, holding the shell of all he has loved and grieving it, before consuming it. 

As he examines his heart on its easel, the slick pink of it dripping blood onto the cathedral floor like heaven’s tears, he thinks of the taste of Will’s skin, the perfect stunned terror in his eyes, the line of his clavicle disappearing into the sweat-stained collar of his shirt. He thinks and longs for it all, longs for Will’s beauty and his imperfection, the whorls of self-incriminating darkness in his mind, the perfect paradox of his morality and cruelty. Then, he wonders if there is a way he and Will can converge again without destroying each other.

\---

Will assembles Hannibal’s portrait in his own mind, constructed from the places he has visited, the lives he has tormented. The more he learns about Hannibal’s labyrinthine past, the more he comes to discover that there is no recipe, no series of traumatic events or environmental triggers to construct a killer. One simply is, or is not. Just as Will is. Hannibal aided in his metamorphosis, perhaps, but every cocoon eventually cracks open to reveal crumpled wet wings, no matter how fiercely the wind batters. 

It feels strange to occupy the places Hannibal once occupied, lonely and eerie, like chasing a ghost. He can imagine him in these shadowed halls and moldering estates, straight-backed and elegant, a statue amid ruin. He can close his eyes and feel his body inches away. The heat of his breath, the thud of his pulse. Will sometimes reaches out across the divide, fingers ghosting across the place he _knows_ Hannibal must have once stood, and thinks of a mirror. And there in his imprint he imagines himself standing, straight-backed and elegant. He imagines himself learning to kill, learning to eat. He imagines himself, and feels almost, almost at home. 

When Will does manage to sleep, he dreams of Hannibal as a young man, bent over his sister’s snail-speckled corpse, blood upon his upper lip and tears welling in those flint black eyes. Just as Will left him, just as he left. He picks the snails off one by one, taking their spiraled shells between thumb and forefinger and plucking them from moon-pale skin. In his dreams, Will sinks to his knees to help him. He presses his open mouth to the bone of his shoulder, he drags it up his throat and feels so sorry, so very sorry for what has happened. The pile of snails grows, and Will eventually leaves to find salt to diminish them all to nothingness. He thinks Hannibal will not want to dine upon the things dining upon his sister. This is how he knows it is a dream. 

He wakes sick and shaking, skin crawling in a layer of half dried sweat like snail slime. And like the tide, he feels as if the moon is drawing him ever closer, the portrait nearly complete. 

\---

Moved and strangely at peace in a way he has not been able to reach in months, Hannibal begins to walk stiffly away from the Primavera, and Will follows like one of his dogs. Perhaps with his hackles up, his teeth bared, prepared to rip Hannibal’s throat from its moorings because that is what they have come to, the crossroads at which they are poised. The death throes of winter teetering upon the edge of an endless spring, but he knows Will cannot allow it, cannot trust himself to truly become the thing he is meant to be, he cannot let himself be reborn. 

They await spring, eternally, as the earth cracks and freezes. Hannibal knows they are heading somewhere private so that they can murder the other, or die trying. He can see it in his minds eye as he limps unevenly ahead, and he decides in that moment that if he cannot have his eternal spring, he will at least steal his final moment of it. Before he dies, before he kills. 

Hannibal turns on his heel and bears down upon Will. Raises both open hands in momentary surrender before closing one over the flickering pale of Will’s throat and backing him up, putting him up against the wall beside the Botticelli, his in this moment, his fragment of spring to keep. The wild frantic flicker of Will’s pulse in his palm surges in his chest like heartbreak, and he’s stunned to feel such a thing, to recall the sensation of having a heart to break in the first place.Will’s eyes are wide and black and terror-stricken; he thinks that this is the end, that Hannibal is going to kill him here beside the Primavera, choke the life from him. He grips Hannibal’s forearm, mauling him helplessly, lips parted in defeat, accepting that he has lost this fight, but it isn’t the most terrible fate to conceive of. 

“I am not going to kill you, Will,” Hannibal murmurs, letting his brow nod against Will’s, feeling the scrape of his scabs, tender and raw. “Not now. Not in this moment.” 

Will softens under him, scrabbles his shaking hands up the front of his clothes and grips him by the collar, drags him in closer. Their breath becomes a feral, messy, combined thing and Hannibal sucks it in, wanting to taste all of Will Graham, his every loss, his every exhalation, his every drop of blood. “What, then?” Will asks, smiling the awed, dismayed smile of a man lost at sea. “Is this your final supper? Or, your penultimate?” 

They lock eyes, an understanding passing between them tacitly, pupil to pupil. _See?_ Hannibal thinks, licking his lips, offering spring. _See?_ Then, he kisses Will. Kisses him deep, grips his chin tight and holds him steady so he can lick into his mouth, parched, starving. Lost at sea himself. His spit tastes exactly how he remembers it, all the terror and all the glory. Will sucks on his tongue, bites him back, laps at the roof of his mouth and there, beside the Botticelli, they say goodbye. 

When they part they are panting, and with his eyes half-lidded and his breath staggering out, Will asks, “Seeing me every day, forever. Is that what you want?” 

Hannibal presses his thumb into the deep and sleepless shadow beneath Will’s eye, he tilts up to mouth messily over the scabs on Will’s brow, tasting railroad grit, metal, sweat, impossibility, spring. “What we want, and what can be so rarely align in this world,” he says, tangling his fingers into the hair at the base of Will’s neck and pulling him ever closer. “Yet, still we try to chase after the impossible. To recreate the platonic ideal.” 

Will shakes his head, ghosts his lips across Hannibal’s cheek wetly. “Isn’t the whole point of the Platonic ideal is that it exists only in the mind?” 

Hannibal lets go, stands upright and brings Will with him, regards his gaze with the steady scrutiny of someone about to be stricken with loss. “That is why, when you are gone, I will visit you as you are in this moment, within my memory-palace. And there, I will see you, every day, forever.” 

Will shakes his head and makes a fist in Hannibal’s jacket lapel, his mouth crumpling half-broken around a smile, a grimace, the skull in the floor, the reminder that in the end, death always wins. It’s a terrible thing to behold, the frailest moment of winter. Hannibal presses one last kiss to the flicker of blood in Will’s throat, smelling the bite of copper there in all its purity, Will untainted by fear, silenced by resignation. He slides his hand up to Will’s stomach, and traces his fingers over the last scar he left in him, thinking wistfully of all that are to come. 

Together they leave, shoulders bumping, two men lost at sea. 

\---


End file.
